Microsoft Surface

I've been working for a week now, with the new Microsoft hardware, Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft Surface, is a multi touch product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of natural motions, hand gestures, or physical objects.

The Microsoft Surface was used by MSNBC during its coverage of the 2008 US presidential election.

Microsoft Surface is a surface computing platform that responds to natural hand gestures and real world objects. It has a 360-degree user interface, a 30-inch reflective surface with a XGA DLP projector underneath the surface which projects an image onto its underside, while four cameras in the machine's housing record reflections of infrared light from objects and human fingertips on the surface.

The surface is capable of object recognition, object/finger orientation recognition and tracking, and is multi-touch and is multi-user. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, pictures or by placing and moving placed objects.

Surface has been optimized to respond to 52 touches at a time.

Using the specially-designed barcode-style "Surface tags" on objects, Microsoft Surface can offer a variety of features, for example automatically offering additional wine choices tailored to the dinner being eaten based on the type of wine set on the Surface, or in conjunction with a password, offering user authentication.

A commercial Microsoft Surface unit is $12,500 (unit only), however Microsoft said it expects prices to drop enough to make consumer versions feasible in 2010.

It's being a good experience. You can program it with WPF, with different objects, for that you have to install the Microsoft Surface SDK.

I'll try to put here some examples, and some source code.